What an interesting pair of questions. I couldn’t even answer the first. My first impulse is to want to go gather some data. 🙂 My second is to think that my perspective is far too skewed by the issues that bug me the most, so I’m sure I would overestimate how often they’re discussed.
This is inexact, but if I take the top two contenders by perception here:
For following Christ I did the following search
site:www.lds.org/general-conference/ “come unto christ”|”discipleship”|”like jesus”|”come follow me”|”following christ”|”christlike”|”disciple”|”take up your cross”|”receive his image”
I got 35,500 results. The one most disputable here is the term “disciple” here, which generates ~10k of the search results. If we assume 25% of these are references to being a discile of Christ that would drop this down to ~27k hits.
for the family, I did
site:www.lds.org/general-conference/ “the family”
I got 27,700 results. I didn’t do just “family” because things like family prayer popped a lot in the initial search results, which I wouldn’t categorize the same.
@Ziff true words. I think sometimes I get on my favorite piano key topic and that’s all I can hear. I have to work at it to hear again.
Do we remember painful things easier than we remember pleasant things? I react with very strong negative emotion whenever there’s a gender roles lesson at church. Lessons on temples, missionary work, obedience, following the prophet, and the priesthood also zing me with varying degrees of confusion, pain, and loneliness. On the other hand, there might be a perfectly lovely day at church, like the one I had a few weeks ago, where we talked about prayer, the mission of Jesus Christ, and service and I was walking on spiritual air all day long. I’m not sure if the former topics really do come up all that much more frequently than the latter, or if it just seems that way because a difficult lesson on “supporting the priesthood” in the third hour can swiftly erase any good feelings I had during the first two hours of church. Same thing at General Conference. I remember the talk about strict obedience that left me crying on the floor because I was sure God did not love me a lot more readily than I remember the other talks from the same session that discussed…well, I don’t remember.
We can’t just measure lds.org mentions, but the experiences of people On the ground in their stakes and wards. I get our memories may be skewed, but on the occasions I do get Christ based sacraments and lessons my husband has to practically stop me from doing a happy dance. I do remember those specifically because they make me so happy, as it’s a hole my soul longs to be filled.
An imperfect but interesting poll.
Ziff, you stats collector you. 😛 A really interesting survey would be to both look at Conference talks, and also collect the subjects of sacrament meeting talks and Stake Conference over the course of a year. If anyone has lots of extra time . ..
That’s a really good point that several of you made about being more sensitive to and thus perhaps overestimating stuff you don’t like. Definitely an imperfect poll!
Sorry to be a complainer, Lynnette. 🙂 I do think it’s a really interesting contrast.
Oh, I don’t mind the complaining! I didn’t think too hard about this — I just randomly put it up. The complaint that we don’t talk about Jesus enough is something I hear a lot, so I’m not terribly surprised by the results.
It’s also interesting to me how often, when something is the subject of a talk in church, it will be presented as the central subject of the gospel. I’ve definitely heard that repeatedly about missionary work, temple work, the family, and the atonement, at least. In an instance I found kind of funny, several people in my ward bore testimony of temple work. Then one of the missionaries got up and announced that we needed to talk about something more central: missionary work (surprise). Evidently a meeting discussing temple work needs to get back on track.
What an interesting pair of questions. I couldn’t even answer the first. My first impulse is to want to go gather some data. 🙂 My second is to think that my perspective is far too skewed by the issues that bug me the most, so I’m sure I would overestimate how often they’re discussed.
This is inexact, but if I take the top two contenders by perception here:
For following Christ I did the following search
site:www.lds.org/general-conference/ “come unto christ”|”discipleship”|”like jesus”|”come follow me”|”following christ”|”christlike”|”disciple”|”take up your cross”|”receive his image”
I got 35,500 results. The one most disputable here is the term “disciple” here, which generates ~10k of the search results. If we assume 25% of these are references to being a discile of Christ that would drop this down to ~27k hits.
for the family, I did
site:www.lds.org/general-conference/ “the family”
I got 27,700 results. I didn’t do just “family” because things like family prayer popped a lot in the initial search results, which I wouldn’t categorize the same.
@Ziff true words. I think sometimes I get on my favorite piano key topic and that’s all I can hear. I have to work at it to hear again.
Do we remember painful things easier than we remember pleasant things? I react with very strong negative emotion whenever there’s a gender roles lesson at church. Lessons on temples, missionary work, obedience, following the prophet, and the priesthood also zing me with varying degrees of confusion, pain, and loneliness. On the other hand, there might be a perfectly lovely day at church, like the one I had a few weeks ago, where we talked about prayer, the mission of Jesus Christ, and service and I was walking on spiritual air all day long. I’m not sure if the former topics really do come up all that much more frequently than the latter, or if it just seems that way because a difficult lesson on “supporting the priesthood” in the third hour can swiftly erase any good feelings I had during the first two hours of church. Same thing at General Conference. I remember the talk about strict obedience that left me crying on the floor because I was sure God did not love me a lot more readily than I remember the other talks from the same session that discussed…well, I don’t remember.
We can’t just measure lds.org mentions, but the experiences of people On the ground in their stakes and wards. I get our memories may be skewed, but on the occasions I do get Christ based sacraments and lessons my husband has to practically stop me from doing a happy dance. I do remember those specifically because they make me so happy, as it’s a hole my soul longs to be filled.
An imperfect but interesting poll.
Ziff, you stats collector you. 😛 A really interesting survey would be to both look at Conference talks, and also collect the subjects of sacrament meeting talks and Stake Conference over the course of a year. If anyone has lots of extra time . ..
That’s a really good point that several of you made about being more sensitive to and thus perhaps overestimating stuff you don’t like. Definitely an imperfect poll!
Sorry to be a complainer, Lynnette. 🙂 I do think it’s a really interesting contrast.
Oh, I don’t mind the complaining! I didn’t think too hard about this — I just randomly put it up. The complaint that we don’t talk about Jesus enough is something I hear a lot, so I’m not terribly surprised by the results.
It’s also interesting to me how often, when something is the subject of a talk in church, it will be presented as the central subject of the gospel. I’ve definitely heard that repeatedly about missionary work, temple work, the family, and the atonement, at least. In an instance I found kind of funny, several people in my ward bore testimony of temple work. Then one of the missionaries got up and announced that we needed to talk about something more central: missionary work (surprise). Evidently a meeting discussing temple work needs to get back on track.